Brainstorming lists of alternative words and phrases is one of the strategies that I have students use when conducting online research. Doing this before they start a search and or whenever they feel stuck can help them generate new search result pages that doesn’t duplicate the results of their previous queries. But sometimes our brainstorming sessions need a little jumpstart. That’s when a tool like Keyword.io can be helpful.
On Keyword.io you can enter a search term and have a list of related search terms generated for you. These are different and more comprehensive lists than Google’s default “people also search for…” suggestions.
Applications for Education
It should be noted that Keyword.io is a service that is designed for search engine optimization and search engine marketing professionals. For that reason, you’ll see a lot of ads for purchasing marketing products that Keyword.io offers. You can ignore those ads and just look at the lists that are generated for free. Those lists can help you and your students come up with some new search terms to use when conducting online research in Google, Bing, and elsewhere.
